Facebook’s Zuckerberg is the focus of latest doctored video

Wednesday, 12 June 2019Three weeks after Facebook refused to remove a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her words, Mark Zuckerberg is getting a taste of his own medicine: fake footage showing him gloating over his one-man domination of the world.

It’s the latest flap over deviously altered “deepfake” videos as Facebook and other social media services struggle to stop the spread of misinformation and fake news while also respecting free speech and fending off allegations of censorship.

The somewhat crude video of the Facebook CEO, created as part of an art project and circulated on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, for the past few days, combines news footage of Zuckerberg with phony audio.

“Imagine this for a second, one man with total control over billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” Zuckerberg seemingly intones in a voice that does not sound very much like Zuckerberg’s.

“I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data controls the future.” (Spectre is the evil organization in the James Bond movies.)

The video was created by artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, with help from artificial intelligence companies, and displayed during the past week or so at an art show in Britain that is designed to demonstrate the influence of technology.

Some people also put the footage on Instagram and Vimeo.

Posters said he targeted Zuckerberg as “one person governing control of 2 billion people’s personal private data. He’s at the center of the debate that asks questions whether that is a safe place for our data to be.”

When the Pelosi video turned up on Facebook, the Menlo Park company said that it did not violate any of its policies.

Facebook has told the Washington Post that the manipulated video showing chief executive Mark Zuckerberg appearing to say “whoever controls the data, controls the future” will remain on its Instagram site even though it may be fact-checked as “false”. The video was made by artists using an...

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